What Ted Kennedy Taught His Followers

The recently reposed Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy (D-Mass.) left a legacy of federal legislation that has brought moral and financial ruin to millions of the poor whom he claimed to champion. His more lasting legacy may be an army of powerful government acolytes whom he infused with his brand of Marxist political beliefs, and who are bent on emulating their mentor in eliminating our few remaining natural rights.

For example, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stated, "Ted Kennedy's dream was the one for which the Founding Fathers fought and for which his brothers sought to realize.”

But what could be a clearer betrayal of the beliefs of the Founders than the policies championed by Ted Kennedy? The founders fought to lift the chains of a tyranical foreign government from our body politic. Their dream was to establish a government that allowed freedom, individual responsibility, limited government, and decentralized authority.

Senator Kennedy’s dream, by contrast, was to to re-shackle us with a massive, smothering, high-taxing, and regulating central government. His dream has nearly come to fruition, but it would have been anathema to the Founding Fathers. Surely the Senate majority leader has a better understanding of history than to actually believe what he said. Rather, he learned the rhetoric of Kennedy socialism, namely how to disguise it as traditional patriotism.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reflected a similar sentiment when she effused, "No one has done more than Senator Kennedy to educate our children, care for our seniors and ensure equality for all Americans. Ted Kennedy's dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration."

To a Marxist, these public expenditures and social control by government would inspire admiration and hallelujahs. To anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as Pelosi, it should be seen as a treasonous betrayal of the sacred trust bequeathed by our Founders.

Peloisi's statement that Senator Kennedy has done more than anyone to care for others is insulting to those millions of our citizens who have invested their lives in actually educating children, in actually caring for seniors, in actually living lives of equinimity toward all regardless of differences, and actually providing healthcare for patients. To Pelosi, extorting tax money from these persons to pay others to do the work, is the sine qua non of service, rather than actually doing something for someone.

In a eulogy delivered at Senator Kennedy's funeral, President Barack Obama showed that he also had learned much from the master: “Ted Kennedy's life's work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections. It was to give a voice to those who were not heard; to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity; to make real the dream of our founding.”

The president, like Senator Reid, invokes the Founders and puts false words in their mouths. He asserts that their dream of limited government was really a vision of giant, unconstrained government, big enough to give something to everyone. Can you imagine Locke and Montesquieu, Paine and Henry, Adams and Jefferson believing that the government programs championed by Senator Kennedy should be the means by which citizens should access the "ladder of opportunity" in life?

Given Kennedy's fanatic support for all forms of abortion, rather than "give a voice to those who were not heard," he ensured that the voices of millions of children would be snuffed out and never heard.

Socialism was the real Kennedy dream, not helping people. A recent article by Joseph Farah, editor at WorldNetDaily, cites an exchange in the Senate between Kennedy and the free-market economist Milton Friedman, where Friedman states, “Senator, socialism has not worked in 6,000 years of recorded history. Why won’t you give up on it?”

Kennedy arrogantly roared back, “It hasn’t worked in 6,000 years because it didn’t have me to run it!”

Even the malapropism-prone Boston Mayor, Thomas M. Menino, who recently reminisced about the senator during the time of his passing, echoed the same lesson that he had learned from the senator, albeit disguised in Hizzoner’s unique mode of expression. Quotes are verbatim:

He really knew how to deliver for us, you know, when Clinton was, uh, president, uh, the cops bill I mean he did a tremendous job in reduce crime in Boston to the point that, uh, some people have made, 33 homicides one year in Boston.

We hosted some breakfast to raise ’em revenues, uh, for that and I think it’s gonna be a great learning place for, uh, young people in the future and I’m really proud to be a very small part of that and, uh, it was Kennedy, Sen. Kennedy’s vision once again to make sure he left something so young people could learn from his experience and learn about what the U.S. Senate is all about.

Innocuous as it may sound, the ideas mangled by Mayor Menino are the same detestable ones expressed more eloquently by the members of Congress and the president — government will give you what you need in life. That is assuming, of course, that the same government does not pay a doctor to kill you first.

Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, President Obama, and Mayor Menino are apt pupils of Senator Kennedy. They have absorbed the lessons of camouflaging the rhetoric of socialism with the cloak of the noble ideas of the founders.

They have embraced his ethos of death. They have avidly pursued the dream of Karl Marx, while deceitfully disguising it as helping people. These politicians never laud a deceased person who actually ascribes to the beliefs of the Founders.

— Photo: AP Images

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